Cutting through the artifice and affectations of life to see the world for what it is

Tuesday, September 14, 2010

There probably is no god; life is intrinsically inhumane

The universe in which we live, particularly on Earth, is replete with deterministically inevitable events that are idiotic and inhumane. This premise, should one properly infer its ramifications, lends itself to the notion that there is no god. Would you, dear reader, as a likely self-proclaimed 'moral' individual, program a machine to have only two core functions -- indiscriminate consumption of organic compounds and indiscriminate reproduction -- and then unleash it upon a world full of sentient creatures? Would you expect to win a Nobel prize for designing and programming a machine to indiscriminately sink sharp, metallic teeth into kittens, for example?

If a god exists, it has decided that such machines are completely acceptable; it did engineer the torture of seels at the expense of the amusement of orcas, after all. Given that god is alleged to be nothing more than an absolute and complete version of a human being* in most cases, the premise that it programmed a deterministic universe wherein indiscriminate suffering takes place -- this universe -- is obviously contradictory. What lesson do the seels learn as they're being tossed about the air like rag dolls by the orcas? If animals as basic (according to modern religion, anyway) as human beings can understand that such events are inefficient and to be avoided, then shouldn't a god be able to as well? If we're smarter and more empathetic than god, then god can't be god.

Stating that our understanding of god is relative and finite as a counterargument is fallacious, as we could say the same of serial killers -- or anything, for that matter. So what if someone murders sixty people for his own satisfaction? Maybe he has a plan. We don't know for a fact that he doesn't, so maybe he does, and therefore, we should let him alone. If this mentality were applied to the most practical aspects of our lives, we'd never accomplish anything.

Does it make sense to listen to a plan for which you have absolutely NO details, especially if the plan has been conferred to you by a fellow human? Has god ever spoken to you personally? If not, then why are you taking your fellow man's word for it when he claims that the details -- the what, how, why, when, and where -- are irrelevant, and that you should just listen to him?

Analogously, let's say that we enroll at a new school, show up, and discover that there are no professors. Then, because someone whom we respect tells us to take his word for it, we remain seated in the classroom indefinitely. The windows are boarded up; the room smells of decaying cadavers; the electricity doesn't work; none of the seats are paired with desks. All of the evidence points toward the school having been forsaken, but because we're emotionally invested in the premise that we're going to receive the best education that we'll ever be able to, we ignore the evidence. It's all a test, we claim.

Life, as a premise involving sentience and lacking in foresight or planning, is unacceptable to any sufficiently rational cognitive processor. All that evolution (forgive my personification) 'cares' about is that organisms become as well adapted to their niches as is possible -- that is, that said organisms are parsimoniously and sufficiently capable of consuming enough energy to maintain their organic processes long enough to generate copies of themselves. Their energy source could be the sun; it could be bamboo shoots; it could just as easily, and often is, your six-year-old child.

So why should life be perpetuated? Using the rest of the universe as a standard, life appears to be freakishly aberrant chemistry -- we're all, literally, mutants. Why is our continued existence such a great idea to perpetuate? Why should we tolerate asteroids blocking out sunlight, thus indirectly starving millions of innocent animals to death? Why should we tolerate parasites and viruses?

Remember: if you can't win a Nobel prize for building a Tyrannosaurus from scratch and letting it tear kittens apart, then god can't either. So let's implicate this capricious menace and rise up against his alleged creation -- a stupid, uncaring reality where anything goes, and whoever has the bigger teeth or sharper claws wins.

* This is absurdly unimaginitive and arrogant; why should we be the ultimate product of the universe, especially when that place likely has trillions of years of life left, while we may not last more than a few more millennia? For modern 'spiritualist' types: you may not think that god created the universe with us in mind specifically, but even if he didn't, what, aside from god, has the capacity to plan creations? Only humans.

In other words, early humans lacked the requisite imagination to be able to bestow any grander properties upon the natural processes that they were attempting to explain, so they instead looked at themselves, saw that they were capable of creating and planning, and concluded that planning and creation are significant phenomena in the universe. They aren't.

You can't take one of the rarest phenomena in the universe and ascribe it to the universe's creation simply because it makes you feel good -- you need evidence, at the very least.

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No Bad Memes is a group dedicated to the uninterrupted competition and selection of the most logical of transmittable concepts, or memes, among human systems and networks. Our goal is to reform the human value system in order to reevaluate sentient life as a concept.

About Me

I'm not here to gain "followers." I don't care about people paying me undue attention, nor do I expect it. Whenever I stumble upon an idea that I think is good, I'll want to share it in order to make Earth a more pleasant locale, not in order to secure some opportunistic vantage point for myself. If you value benevolence, want to fix sentience, and see virtue in squashing the endless pursuit of transient brain states, get in touch. Email: leavingsocietybehind@gmail.com